I’ve been musing, thinking, problem-solving, photographing, counting, editing, and thinking some more all week. The problem? How to cleanly and efficiently share our inventory counts with our clients. Even though we have many lovely photographs on our website and on Pinterest, a more detailed description was still needed so clients could know more precisely what vintage treasures we offer. The solution had eluded me until I started mucking around in WordPress and its accompanying widgets.
Then, a most wonderful thing happened…
I discovered how to make a simple slideshow that can exhibit more than one image on the screen with individual descriptions. Ta dah! Now, please appreciate that this did take a bit of trial and lots of errors, but admittedly, I am pleased with myself. 🙂
I figured out pretty quickly that each photo needed to be standardized as far as size and look. Gulp. This meant that many, if not most, of our photos would have to be re-edited at the very least and probably a lot more would need to be retaken. The magnitude of this task took a while for me to accept, but with a long, deep breath, I resolutely began with the recently-published-but now-defunct Vintage Glassware Inventory page.
After revising this slideshow and fine-tuning the settings, our teapot collection was next in line. I pulled each off the shelves, matched them with their lids stored in a separate container, organized them on the table to get an idea on how to order them in the slideshow, created a backdrop, and then photographed each one. After measuring the capacity of several pots, and deciding on how much a teacup would hold, I also had a serving estimate for each.
With the more tedious part done, I created the slideshow with the new photos and added it to a new Inventory page along with the new glassware slideshow. Check it out – the page is called Inventory and now housed on our main menu. Whoop whoop! But this is just the beginning!
The upcoming set of inventory will be our Large Decor Collection. I’ve got a good start and hope to add this slide show sometime soon. What’s after this? Still pondering that one – there are so many to choose from! 🙂 🙁
In the meantime, I’m also getting ready for a retirement tea party this week and two weddings the following weekend. Lots to do and enjoying every bit of it!
Thanks for visiting and have a terrific week! Looks like the sun will be coming back to NC mid-week – thank goodness!
(For those who are interested, I will share two secrets about taking photos. The first secret is that I use my iPhone6 camera. The technique for taking this kind of photo is a bit tricky but not rocket science. After taking the image, I first use the iPhoto app on the phone to straighten and crop the image. The second big secret is that I edit the image with an app I just love – Camera360. It’s free and amazing! (Thanks, Cat, for sharing this with me.) These photos are magically uploaded to iCloud and I then open them on my computer in iPhoto, name them and make a few minor adjustments, and export to a folder on iCloud. The final step is to import them into the WordPress library. None of this is difficult but it does take time and lots of it.)
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You are amazing! What a meticulous process. This will be great for future customers.
Huge thank you!